What are you reading?

[Malaphax]

Couple lists from goodreads about recent Sci-fi and Fantasy (last 3 years):

https://www.goodreads.com/blog/show/2630-the-most-popular-fantasy-novels-of-the-past-three-years

https://www.goodreads.com/blog/show/2633-the-top-new-sci-fi-books-of-the-past-three-years

Some specific books I'll probably take a look at:

Same author as two series I've enjoyed: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/50623864-the-invisible-life-of-addie-larue

Same author as Johnathan Strange and Mr. Norrell (I did not read but enjoyed the show and the premise): https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/50202953-piranesi

[Malaphax]

On 6/29/2023 at 3:05 PM, Malaphax said:

Half a King - I've seen Joe Abercrombie's books come across my recommendations, so I'll give this a shot.  [...]
The first book was solid, there are some similarities to Game of Thrones or more "dark fantasy" that isn't afraid to kill off character or make point of view characters suffer, rather than more escapist heroes journey types of fantasy.  I'll continue reading through the trilogy since it's fairly easy to read - but the series isn't exactly doing anything new or unique.  I do appreciate that there's no magic (so far) and it's more basic on the nordic or early english setting, with viking style raids and multiple kings competing for power.  They don't go into detail but there's some references to capitalism or unified currencies being used as levers of power - this was much better described and explored in the Baru Cormorant series.  

While I liked the series, I didn't enjoy the ending.  There's a bit of deus ex machina combined with a major character revealing all of their secrets and having an emotional breakdown, which is the complete opposite of the character in question.  
The fantasy setting with zero magic* was a nice change of pace compared to most fantasy I've read, but the pseudo viking inspired setting didn't really go much deeper than that.  I appreciate that each book is told from different character perspectives while still having characters from earlier in the series be present, but the third book added multiple pov characters and felt muddled.  I guess I'd give this a soft recommendation.  

Currently reading:
A Memory Called Empire - This won the hugo award for 2020, so I'm hoping it's a solid piece of scifi.  The premise is sort of interesting, and the initial chapters seem to set up a very intimate portrayal of the "stranger in a strange land" trope.  

[Malaphax]

I ended up jumping around different books on vacation.  

• The Sunlit Man - Another branden sanderson book.  It's tied into his wider worldbuilding, but set far in the future - it technically is about a very minor character mentioned in one of his mainline series.  The premise was a small planetoid where the sunlight was deadly and the entire planet's inhabitants live on ships that constantly move just ahead or just behind the sunlit areas.  Neat little story, but due to the interconnectedness it doesn't really work unless you've read large portions of his other works.  
• Piranesi - It's by the same authoer as johnothan strange and mr. norrel.  I didn't like the book, the whimsical nature was mostly ok, but the entire premise felt wasted and the plot was minimal and slow.  
• The Invisible Life of Addie Larue - I've enjoyed books by the author before.  It's a rendition of a "deal with the devil" story.  It's been a plodding journey and depending on how much longer this takes I might just drop it.  

[Malaphax]

I read through the Convenant of Steel series (The Paraiah, The Martyr, and The Traitor).  It's a very low magic medieval style fantasy setting.  The writing was solid enough, but the final book felt a bit rushed.  I always appreciate low (or no) magic fantasy as a palate cleanser, they often feel like big budget sword and sandals style movies rather than something grandiose and magical.  The series also plays a bit with ideas of prophecy, as well as religious zealotry - nothing particularly deep but that also struck me as ideas I've seen most fantasy books skirt.  

I'm moving on to The Divide series, which is a military sci-fi with a crew of rag-tag individuals facing the impossible (if this sounds like tropes you've read before - yea that's how I feel so far).  I'm trying to tack back to sci-fi because I've been hitting the fantasy stuff pretty hard for a while and would like to shake things up a bit.  

Offtopic book stuff:

3 Body Problem has a series out (two actually, one from tencent, another from Netflix), I've read some basic synopsis about the series, and some reviews that mention the show is taking some liberties with the adaptation.  I don't know that I'll ever read the books.  

The Murderbot series is getting an adaptation.  I'm excited but concerned, huge sections of the book are internal monologue and I'm not sure that's an easy adaptation without voiceover, which could end up being cheesy.  Also I'm a bit concerned that they're casting Alexander Skarsgard as the titular Murderbot because the character is aggressively asexual and their monologue reads slightly feminine (it's a female author, I assume that's just a bit of bleed through).

[Malaphax]

On 3/26/2024 at 11:09 AM, Malaphax said:

I'm moving on to The Divide series, which is a military sci-fi with a crew of rag-tag individuals facing the impossible (if this sounds like tropes you've read before - yea that's how I feel so far).  I'm trying to tack back to sci-fi because I've been hitting the fantasy stuff pretty hard for a while and would like to shake things up a bit.  

Yea, barely finished the first book and I was totally done with this entire series.  The characters are bland, uninteresting and unsympathetic.  The story was so generic and uninspired I honestly believe they structured an outline with placeholder names like "mcguffin" and then did a find/replace as part of a final draft.  Don't waste your time on this book/series.  

Hunt the Stars - I have conflicted feelings on this.  It's scifi but also straddles the line of romance (not smut), and while that hasn't bothered me yet it's quite different from most of what I read.  I'll at least finish off this book and see where it goes, but so far it's a very easy read.  

[kuhla]

https://www.goodreads.com/series/216281-the-green-bone-saga

I finished these books a long time ago. It was a lot of day-to-day life for a powerful family run gang over many many years as they have their own struggles in a rapidly modernizing world.

I couldn't even tell you what books I read the last 2-3 months. I don't remember them.

I'm currently circling back to finish off an older series but I will be fresh out of material at that point and will need to go seek out new books.

[Malaphax]

On 4/8/2024 at 9:21 AM, Malaphax said:

Hunt the Stars - I have conflicted feelings on this.  It's scifi but also straddles the line of romance (not smut), and while that hasn't bothered me yet it's quite different from most of what I read.  I'll at least finish off this book and see where it goes, but so far it's a very easy read.  

The romance aspects weren't my thing, and the general story ended up more bland than I would like.  I'm not interested in finishing this series. 

Working on Starter Villain from John Scalzi.  I've liked most of Scalzi's stuff before and this definitely seems more lightheated and similar to redshirts (which I haven't read).  It will serve as a nice palate cleanser. 

[kuhla]

https://www.goodreads.com/series/193893-the-winnowing-flame-trilogy

Read book 1 and 2 a while back and then gave up the series because it just really was not doing anything for me. I have not grabbed anything new but needed something to read so I have been grinding through book #3 from this series. It's really just kind of boring and I have issues believing some of the characters.

Putting these links here for later reference. I'm going to need new stuff very soon.

https://www.goodreads.com/choiceawards/best-fantasy-books-2023

https://www.goodreads.com/choiceawards/best-science-fiction-books-2023

[kuhla]

Empire of the Vampire #1
Empire of the Vampire
Jay Kristoff

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/56269205-empire-of-the-vampire

Quote

It has been twenty-seven long years since the last sunrise. For nearly three decades, vampires have waged war against humanity; building their eternal empire even as they tear down our own. Now, only a few tiny sparks of light endure in a sea of darkness.

....

 

More than half way in. Not exactly enlightened reading but I'm kind of having fun with it. Feels a lot like a witcher story. Special individuals who train and specialize in killing monsters who are a bit ostracized from normal society.

[Malaphax]

On 8/24/2024 at 11:24 AM, Malaphax said:

Working on Starter Villain from John Scalzi.  I've liked most of Scalzi's stuff before and this definitely seems more lightheated and similar to redshirts (which I haven't read).  It will serve as a nice palate cleanser. 

Dropped this, it wasn't pulling me in.  I might go back to it one day, it wasn't offensively bad, just not what I was in the mood for.  

I'm about halfway through Empire of Silence [Sun Eater #1] - I've heard this is a solid modern space opera series, with heavy influence from Dune books.  So far this is solid with some interesting if familiar worldbuilding elements and some neat asides where the author/protagonist inserts a reference to a future event, with just enough of a tease to keep you engaged.  It leans heavily on some fantasy elements, and isn't hard sci-fi but so far I've been enjoying it.  

Sidenote: I know it's easy shorthand to have medieval style lords and landed gentry in sci-fi and especially space operas but man, I wish authors did something else.

[kuhla]

On 11/14/2024 at 5:37 PM, kuhla said:

Empire of the Vampire #1
Empire of the Vampire
Jay Kristoff

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/56269205-empire-of-the-vampire

 

More than half way in. Not exactly enlightened reading but I'm kind of having fun with it. Feels a lot like a witcher story. Special individuals who train and specialize in killing monsters who are a bit ostracized from normal society.

I'm still grinding through this. It's been going slow lately. Too sleepy.

[Malaphax]

On 12/11/2024 at 2:15 PM, Malaphax said:

I'm about halfway through Empire of Silence [Sun Eater #1] - I've heard this is a solid modern space opera series, with heavy influence from Dune books.  So far this is solid with some interesting if familiar worldbuilding elements and some neat asides where the author/protagonist inserts a reference to a future event, with just enough of a tease to keep you engaged.  It leans heavily on some fantasy elements, and isn't hard sci-fi but so far I've been enjoying it.  

Sidenote: I know it's easy shorthand to have medieval style lords and landed gentry in sci-fi and especially space operas but man, I wish authors did something else.

Finished this.  Solid enough I'll continue the series.  I'm always happy when I see a series recommendation that's recent and has regular releases - first book released in 2018 and has sequels releasing annually.  

Wind and Truth - Yea it's another in the stormlight archive, and yes it's like 1300 pages but I'm enjoying it.  There's also so many different POV characters that the variety is really nice.  I personally enjoyed that aspect of the Song of Ice and Fire series, and I'm enjoying it in this book.  There's definitely been an increase in the interconnectedness of these books and his other work (he specifically says it's all a shared universe, and has released books with varying degrees of expanded lore), and I'm mostly ok with the increase but I'm starting to realize it's going to suffer if it gets much bigger in his more "mainline" novels.  I'd prefer if he kept the overarching plots to more niche books but I suspect his audience is fine with it.  Just makes recommending his books harder if you need to read 12+ novels to understand his recent releases.  

James S. A Correy (expanse authors) came out with a new space opera series - The Mercy of the Gods - I'll give this a go at some point.  

There's also the 2024 goodreads winners: https://www.goodreads.com/choiceawards/best-books-2024

And NPR's list: https://apps.npr.org/best-books/#view=covers&year=2024

[Malaphax]

Wind and Truth - I finished this, and have mixed to negative feelings about it.  Sanderson has never been great at prose, but there's some real serious inconsistency across parts of the book.  Modern language mixed in that feels jarring.  The humor is almost entirely bad.  And yet, there are whole sections of the book that I really enjoyed.  It's frustrating because I feel like some of his other books were better written and better edited and yet this is supposed to be a semi-capstone of this series.  There are some lines so full of cringe I almost groaned out load.  

I hope the criticism reaches Sanderson, and he either finds a new editor or slows down, because this wasn't a great showing.  I know supposedly he won't touch this series again for several years while he works on other projects, maybe he can take the time to reflect and improve.  I personally felt like you could see his improvement across his books, but this was a big step backwards.  

Spoiler

I really enjoyed the Adolin chapters, and feel like this is "his" book.  Some of the flashbacks of Szeth were interesting if a bit heavy handed.  All the spiritual realm was not just obnoxious but boring over explanation of certain plot elements that didn't seem to serve the story particularly well.  

This is one of the first times that I felt like his outlining was either too rigid poorly conceived.  There's a 10 day ticking clock, another 10 temples / honor blades that need to be conquered, and then several cities/territories that need to be addressed.  Except this feels almost procedural, let's check the boxes.  

The final confrontation that he's spent 5 books and 5000+ pages moving towards was... super boring?  Like you literally give a world class general and ruler a trolly problem?  And he makes the wrong decision on top of that?  What the fuck bro?  

I'm going to post this quote from the book because it stands alone as just how terribly written some parts of the book are:

“How?” Ishar repeated. “What are you?” He gestured toward Szeth. “Are you … are you his spren? His god?”
“No,” Kaladin said. “I’m his therapist.”

Please fuck right off.  

Moving on to the next book in the Sun Eater series.  

[kuhla]

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18952341-the-grace-of-kings

The Dandelion Dynasty #1
The Grace of Kings
Ken Liu

Quote

Wily, charming Kuni Garu, a bandit, and stern, fearless Mata Zyndu, the son of a deposed duke, seem like polar opposites. Yet, in the uprising against the emperor, the two quickly become the best of friends after a series of adventures fighting against vast conscripted armies, silk-draped airships, and shapeshifting gods. Once the emperor has been overthrown, however, they each find themselves the leader of separate factions—two sides with very different ideas about how the world should be run and the meaning of justice.

Still pretty early in this. It's very large in scale, covering many years, only a few characters but some of them are very major in the world of the book. I cannot read it very fast because of the writing style. Curious where it's going and I will be sticking with it.

[Malaphax]

On 2/11/2025 at 10:23 AM, Malaphax said:

Wind and Truth - I finished this, and have mixed to negative feelings about it.  Sanderson has never been great at prose, but there's some real serious inconsistency across parts of the book.  Modern language mixed in that feels jarring.  The humor is almost entirely bad.  And yet, there are whole sections of the book that I really enjoyed.  It's frustrating because I feel like some of his other books were better written and better edited and yet this is supposed to be a semi-capstone of this series.  There are some lines so full of cringe I almost groaned out load.  

I hope the criticism reaches Sanderson, and he either finds a new editor or slows down, because this wasn't a great showing.  I know supposedly he won't touch this series again for several years while he works on other projects, maybe he can take the time to reflect and improve.  I personally felt like you could see his improvement across his books, but this was a big step backwards.  

So, I wasn't holding out much hope, but Sanderson did announce that he's "slowing down" insofar as he's going to have a 2 year gap until his next release.  He announced that when he first started writing he had between 12-18 months of editing / rewriting on projects but as he got more popular the publisher basically kept pushing to shorten that.  I suspect this resulted in very quick editing passes because "why bother, his books sell well" and that resulted in a really crappy release of a big book.  
I think the criticism landed hard enough that he's now going to keep that 12-18 months of editing / rewriting moving forward.  Which is great news.  His next projects are Mistborn Era 3, which has been teased as futuristic / science fantasy.  Considering I enjoyed mistborn era 2 way more than era 1, I'm excited for it.  

 

I just finished The Fragile Threads of Power - which is a continuation of the Shades of Magic Series.  Technically the first series was listed as YA, but don't let that fool you, it was enjoyable and didn't come across that way, in fact the continuation series dropped that description completely.  
I enjoy the world building in these books, there's a rule based magic system which isn't too rigid and some cool multiverse ideas that don't come across as marvel style, more like portals to similar worlds.  It's an easy read, and while the villain / plot for this first novel didn't come across as particularly interesting there's enough setup for future books that I'm certainly interested.  

I'll start up Mercy of the Gods - by James S. A. Corey (authors behind the expanse series).  

[kuhla]

On 4/28/2021 at 4:40 PM, kuhla said:

Finished it.

Now reading Daemon by Daniel Suarez.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6665847-daemon

Still pretty early in the book. It is easy to read so it is moving quickly. I was thrown for a loop early on when a character in the book was talking about unsecured SSIDs, exploiting netbios vulnerabilities and privileged escalation. Felt like I was reading something for work for a moment. I had to go check some info about the author and it states he has worked in IT but he must have done security specific work to mention those types of events. Not much to comment about the plot yet which I think is still being setup.

Even with the "it felt like work" problem, that I mentioned previously, I did try to revisit this. It is rated highly and I see lots of positive posts about it however I ran into a new problem. There is an explicit, orchestrated gang-rape of a minor which, even though it was from the point of view of an antagonist character, just felt entirely unnecessary to include. The book moved on from that but in the back of my head I just kept worrying that the author was going to do something extremely uncomfortable like that again. Ultimately decided to drop it.

Working on something new but too early to post about it.